Email Transparent Compression

Can I compress email messages transparently, like my web server does with HTTP pages? It seems to me that there should be some basic compression/decompression protocol supported by servers and clients, to increase the transfer speed for large emails. The compression should be transparent to the user, which means she should not need to use an exteal tool like 7zip or some email client plugin. If there is no such method, could you explain why this is the case?

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